“Thank you for waiting, Mr. Fitch. Please come into my office. Zane, I can take calls.” She closed the door behind them.
Roger dropped into Giulia’s client chair and slugged more of his V8. “Okay. Thirteen days ’til my trial starts. What’s the strategy?”
Giulia’s professional mask never cracked, even as she catalogued Fitch as a typical problem child. Well, she didn’t spend ten years teaching high school students in challenging settings to allow a client like this to disturb her equilibrium. Besides, the attitude was most likely slapped on to cover his fear of that looming antiseptic death chamber with its poison-filled needle.
Out loud, she said, “I’ve worked up a multi-step plan. It’s labor-intensive, but the time constraints give us no choice.”
“I knew it. Laid in a stock of these V8s and single malt and steaks to get me through.”
She opened her spreadsheet on her desktop rather than the tablet, for the sake of using her ergonomic keyboard.
“I want to go over some of the ground that the police have already walked.”
“Good God, why?”
“Because my team will look at it in a very different way than the police did. See these DNA reports?” She handed those papers out to him.
He made a puking noise. “I remember those giant Q-tips they stuck in my mouth and in Lori’s.”
“They’re going to be just as much use to us as they are to the prosecution. So are the police reports and all the crime scene photographs.”
A shrug. “You’re the boss.”
“True. First of all, I would like more background on you and Loriela. Specifically, the restraining order.”
Fitch’s eyes narrowed. “Scheming bitch. Lori’s mother, that is. Ever read up on Alexander the Great? His mother was a real piece of work. Pushed, pushed, pushed; killed off rivals; thought up more schemes than contestants on reality shows. Lori’s mother could’ve been her star pupil.”
Giulia typed it all up with a straight face. “And?”
“I wasn’t good enough for Madre Cassandra’s little princess. Forget the fact that Madre Cassandra raised her princess in a two-room welfare apartment because Madre Cassandra spent her career cleaning second-rate office buildings.”
“There is nothing demeaning about working with one’s hands,” Giulia said.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Honest wages for honest labor, yada yada. Lori got a full ride to Temple because of her kickass grades combined with Madre’s extremely limited income, so it all worked out.” He shook the V8, drank the dregs, and tossed it dead-center into the trash can. “Oh, no,” Fitch continued. “Nothing less than a CEO was good enough for the princess. Of course Lori wasn’t like that. If she was here, she’d tell you I was the guy that made her get a clue.” He stood up and started pacing the narrow space. “Lori inherited two things from her mother: legs up to here—” he stopped pacing and gestured at the level of his lowest ribs—“and love for the bad boys. She broke a guy’s nose in high school and brought a successful sexual assault suit against a guy in her junior year at Temple.”
Without breaking her typing rhythm, Giulia headed up a new column for the college incident.
“Madre Cassandra conveniently ignored her own tastes in male companionship and became suspicious of anyone who wanted to date her daughter. Lori moved into a better neighborhood and started her own catalog of Bad Choices. Thought she could handle anything when AtlanticEdge recruited her right out of college.”
Fitch leaned on the windowsill and stared out.
“They got decent pizza at that place across the street?”
“Yes, they do. I gather you’re about to tell me Loriela made some poor choices when she started out on her own.”
With a brief laugh, Fitch faced into the room again. “You’re right. I don’t have time to get distracted. Lori hooked up with a bartender with baby-blue eyes and a head full of muscle. Lots of muscle on the rest of him, too. Lori found that out fast enough.”
“Name, please?”
“Jonathan Stallone, no lie. ‘Yo, Adrian’ and all that. Cops should have his address. He only called Lori once when I knew her, and she shut him down pretty fast.” He waited for Giulia to finish typing. “The guy I shouldered out of her life hates my guts, but who cares? He thought he was tough ’til I kicked his ass. Then there’s the other manager who got passed over for promotion when Lori was named head of bookkeeping. She got transferred to the unemployment line.” He spelled out both names.
“Thank you.” Giulia stretched her arms above her head. “Mr. Petit mentioned a restraining order against you.”
“Didn’t think you’d forget about that.” He put on an air of repentance. “Happened when Lori took me to stay with Madre Cassandra our second Christmas together. Couple days after Christmas, I got bored, Lori started arguing with her mother, with me, with the nosy neighbors across the hall. So I bailed and got wasted at the corner bar—real trash heap, but good beer. Lori came after me. I didn’t want to go back to that rat-trap of an apartment. Then, would you believe it, her mother followed her to the bar. Started nagging Lori, who started nagging me. Who the hell needs that?”
Giulia typed it all as though she was transcribing nothing more interesting than a term paper.
“I had at least three boilermakers in me. Wasn’t at my best, you know? Lori grabbed my arm and dug her pointy nails into my skin. I shoved her off me and she crashed into a barstool. Cut her scalp. You know how head wounds gush blood. Her mother screamed and cussed at me in Spanish. I helped Lori up, the bartender handed me a towel and some vodka, and I cleaned her up. Hurt her like hell. She said a few choice words to me, too.”
Giulia reminded herself not to judge.
“We ignored Madre pitching a fit and headed back to the apartment together. I patched Lori up and we had a heart-to-heart.” He walked behind her desk and read over her shoulder. “Open up YouTube, will you? Type in ‘Mother-in-Law Trouble.’ There it is. Third from the top.”
Giulia clicked the link. A shaky video began. The ceiling lights reflected in the mirror behind the bar showed the standard row of hard liquor bottles, a line of bar stools, several beer bottles on the bar itself, and a few tables off to the right and left. Something by Metallica played in the background, but Giulia couldn’t tell which song because of the full-volume brawl in the foreground.
A tall woman with blonde-streaked black hair screamed Spanish curses in a progressively higher voice. Fitch stood opposite her, arguing with both her and an equally tall woman with short auburn hair. Giulia recognized Loriela Gil from the police photos. Loriela’s voice was pitched lower than her mother’s, but every so often it jumped up and the two sounded identical.
Fitch’s lines cycled through “Shut up!” “Leave me alone,” and “Fuck this. Just fuck this.”
Then Loriela grabbed Fitch’s arm and he cursed louder. When he shoved her off, five circles of blood appeared on his t-shirt sleeve. A crash and several gasps and noises covered the music. The camera swung left. Loriela lay on the floor, a bar stool on top of her and two more rolling away in opposite directions. Her mother’s voice reached new heights. Loriela held one hand to the back of her head and told Fitch exactly what she thought of him with the middle finger of the other.
Male laughter much closer to the camera drowned out all the other noise for a moment. Fitch’s back filled the screen and then he was helping Loriela onto one of the still-upright stools. The bartender handed him a towel and a vodka bottle. Fitch wet the towel and wiped Loriela’s hair. It came away covered with blood.
“Ow! Asshole.” Loriela took the bottle and gulped from it.
Her mother hadn’t stopped yelling. One of the closer male voices translated, “He’s the son of a whore, she’ll cut his cojones off if he ever touches her daughter again, he’s lower than a fly on a dung heap, and back around to his questionable parentage.”
Fitch took Loriela by the waist and together they walked around her mother and out the door.
The camera followed them until Loriela’s mother’s furious face filled the entire screen.
“You have recorded this? You will send it to me, yes?”
“Uh, sure, lady.” The voice tried to be soothing.
Her mother shook Loriela’s bloody towel at the screen. “I will make him pay for this.”
She ran out of the bar. The male voice said, “Should’ve checked out the mother before he married the daughter.” The video ended.
What Giulia wanted to say was, “Could you possibly make this any more difficult?” What she said was, “The restraining order followed directly after the incident in the video?”
“Yeah.” Fitch took two folded papers out of his back pocket and spread them on Giulia’s desk. “I brought it for you to see. Colby has the original. He wasn’t going to give it to you because he said it put me in a bad light. Heh. Like you couldn’t find this out on your own.”
She read through them. “Based on the Affidavit and Petition for an Order for Protection in this matter, an Order for Protection should be issued...Refrain from assault, stalking, harassment...” She looked up at him when she finished the second page. “Since your relationship continued, what exactly happened with regard to this?”
“Len Tulley, he’s one of Lori’s co-workers, sent me the YouTube link. Don’t know how he saw it and didn’t care. I went straight to my VP at eight the next morning. It helped a lot that he and I were regular drinking buddies and spotted each other on weights at the company workout room. I put a good spin on it and got Lori on speakerphone. What saved my bacon is we never used each other’s names on the video. Nothing searchable linked me or the company to the bar fight.”
Giulia allowed her skeptical expression to speak for her.
“No, no, really. My VP took it to Lori’s VP and they took it together to the weekly steering meeting. Management always likes proactive rather than reactive plans. ’Course, what really helped is that Lori and I’d posted increasing ROI and on-budget projects for the past seven quarters straight. We both got an official warning with a copy in our employee files.”
Giulia typed like a machine.
“A cop showed up at my apartment with a summons a couple of days later. Lori went with me to the hearing and totally took my side against Cassandra.” Triumph filled his voice. “The judge tossed it out. Cassandra cursed at me, but the judge threatened to charge her with contempt or some such, and she shut up. It was funny.”
Giulia pressed her lips together. She saved her working document and reminded herself, again, not to judge the client.
Eleven
Giulia heaved the delivery box onto her desk and extracted a gray folder labeled “Fitch/Gil correspondence” and the case number.
“Let’s move onto the emails you and Ms. Gil exchanged at work.”
Fitch dropped into her client chair exactly like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
“You’re a woman. Tell me what it is with you women and drama.”
Giulia’s back stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”
“You know. The angry texts. The weepy voicemails. Emails like these. Did you read them?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about.” He pulled the folder toward him and opened it. “I mean, come on. ‘Mi querido, I wept into my pillow half the night after you left. Why do you say such cruel words to me, who you have called the queen of your heart?’”
Giulia tried and failed to imagine Roger Fitch saying those words to anyone. “What did you say to Ms. Gil to cause her to send you such a personal email on the work server?”
Fitch grumbled. “I don’t remember. I probably saw a babe in a short skirt and said she looked better in it than Lori would. If anything could set her off, comparing her to a hot blonde cheerleader was number one.” He wagged his eyebrows. “Nothing beats a pair of long legs in a short skirt.”
All he needed was a cigar and a greasepaint mustache and he’d be Groucho Marx.
“If Ms. Gil disliked hearing such remarks, why didn’t you keep them to yourself?”
“Seriously? Jeez, women are insecure. Guys don’t give a crap about being compared to other guys, not if they’re confident in their own prowess. Lori was gorgeous, sexy, and had cojones. She should’ve known I wouldn’t dump her for some blonde bimbo.”
“That’s why you replied—” Giulia retrieved the folder and checked the time stamp on the next sheet— “four minutes later, also on the company server?”
“Ah, company email use is flexible. The VP of Research runs two outside football pools on his, plus the office one. So yeah I answered Lori right back. Upper management loved us. I wasn’t worried.”
Giulia skipped the next two pages. “Not even when, two replies later, you described in detail your plans for your makeup evening?”
He spread his palms out. “What? I said I’d take her dancing at her favorite club.”
“Mr. Fitch, please don’t sham disingenuous. I’m referring to the paragraph after that, in which you detail what she should wear under her miniskirt and spandex top and how you planned to end the evening.”
One side of Fitch’s mouth curled in a salacious half-grin. The ruler in Giulia’s desk was begging her to use it to rap his knuckles.
“Yeah, well, Lori’d get into this ‘I’m not white and blonde and perfect’ funk. I knew how to snap her out of it.” He flicked the open folder. “Management likes happy employees. Happy employees perform better. I made Lori happy, which made me happy, which made me a better salesman. Simple.”
Giulia flipped to the last page. “Then this rebuke from management to both of you meant nothing?”
“Pfft. A speed bump. Nah not even that. A pebble. You check my sales figures for that month. I guarantee they were up.”
Giulia squeezed her forehead with her thumb and index finger. “Nevertheless, these emails are an indication your relationship was volatile.”
Fitch stood and walked away from the desk. “Oh, come on. Everybody fights. The cops tried to make me admit that Lori and I were unstable and, yeah, volatile. Stupid word. We kept our relationship interesting.” He swept his arms wide, encompassing the room. “We were nothing like this room, all pale and boring. We were bright colors and loud music and excitement.”
“That’s quite poetic. I’ll keep it in mind as I gather information about your case.” She clicked a blank page in the spreadsheet. “As part of going over the same ground as the police, I’d like to talk to some of the people they interviewed, if that’s all right.”
Fitch resumed his circuits of the office. “If it’ll get me closer to freedom, I’m all for it.”
“Thank you for being so cooperative.”
He shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I? Most of my dirty laundry is going to get paraded in front of a jury in two weeks. You’re only one person. I can handle you knowing my sordid side.”
He dictated names, addresses, and phone numbers for Loriela’s mother, the bartender Loriela dated, the co-worker who told him about the video, three of their neighbors, and Loriela’s former co-worker who got passed over for promotion.
The clock in her icon tray read 11:10. Giulia stood. “Mr. Fitch, that’s plenty for me to work on for the next day or two. You’ve been suspended from your job for the time being, correct?”
“Yeah. What else could they do? They can’t fire me because it’ll be bad for their image when you and Colby prove I didn’t do it. But they’re—quote—giving me this time off to prepare my defense—unquote. With pay, since it’s a small risk for them.”
“You’re cynical.”
“I’m realistic. For the past year I’ve been working exactly as hard as I did before all this started. This way they don’t have the aggravation of training a new employee. When I’m cleared, they welcome me back all smug and self-righteous. They’re also thinking that just in case I’m guilty, they come out of it pure as the driven snow and all that crap because they kept faith with their employee no matter wha
t.”
Giulia opened her door onto the main office. “I wish I could find an argument against all that.”
Zane said into the phone, “Certainly we won’t contact you via email if you prefer we call your cell number.”
Sidney pounded her index finger on her keyboard. “I said add a page number and a header, you ridiculous machine!”
Giulia walked Fitch to the main door. “Expect to hear from me late tomorrow. It could be very late, so don’t be concerned if I don’t call you by five o’clock.”
Roger Fitch, suspected murderer, possible embezzler, violent yet ego-driven charmer, turned his charming smile on Giulia.
“If you’ll forgive a cliché, my life is in your hands.”
Giulia turned Bambi eyes on him. “No, I really can’t forgive anything as obvious as that. I’m sure a top salesman like you would never resort to canned phrases.”
He laughed. “You win that round. I’ll stop playing the ‘poor me’ card. All business from here on.”
Twelve
Giulia closed the door behind Fitch and sagged against it.
Zane covered his phone. “Ms. Driscoll? Are you okay?”
Giulia waved at him to continue the conversation.
Sidney’s fingers didn’t miss a key. “Let me start a list: Number one, his ego. Number two, his ego. Number three, his ego. Want me to lure him out to the farm so Belle can spit on him?”
Laughter burst from Giulia’s mouth. Zane huddled over his phone. Giulia tiptoed over to Sidney’s desk and sank into her client chair.
“I do not like that man.”
Sidney giggled. “I don’t think he realizes it. I bet he thinks he’s bamboozled you into believing everything he says, even though I can tell you were grilling him in there. Olivier could write an article for Psychology Today about him. He’s been published in smaller journals, but he’s still trying to get past PT’s form rejections.”
Nun Too Soon (A Giulia Driscoll Mystery Book 1) Page 6